Titivating my 300CE-24

[tianimu]

I'm posting this because my dear friend Jonathan (aka r129sl) should get some public credit for the help he's been providing me in titivating what is turning out to be a rather lovely 1991 300CE-24 I bought sight unseen from a carandclassic.co.uk advert last year. Unusually for me, I didn't dither too much when I saw it, because it ticked all the boxes: pre-facelift, so orange indicator lenses, a proper grille and sensible black bumpers, the straight six engine, a 5 speed box, Sportline, blue-black over black leather, aircon, and the absolutely necessity if you live the in North-East, heated seats. After probably spending 5 years looking at an ever dwindling on-line supply of pre-facelift coupes, this was the dream car. So 5 mins into my first call to the dealer, all the way down in Ilford, I agreed a "buy it now" price of £4k and the 87k mile car was shipped up to the Toon by Beamish Transport to be received into Jonathan's over-excitable arms whilst I was away in Mallorca crying into my pillow about my latest doomed relationship.

Here it is when I finally got my hands on it, Jonathan already having probably spent all night polishing it whilst Mrs Jonathan lay alone in an empty bed wondering whether marrying him was All Just A Big Mistake:



And here a week or two later is after yet more Jonathan treatment:





The car looks pretty snazzy, right? Well, up to a point. Issues included bouncy suspension, no air con, a hole in the roof where a car phone aerial was, delaminated rear screen with non-working heating element, the nearside windows not winding and the offside seat belt butler not functioning. Some clown had taken off the 300CE-24 badge (is that not the best badge in the world?) and there was some aftermarket nonsense where the Becker should be. Plus shabby alloys, misalingned bonnet, inoperable radio aerial, wrinkling dashboard and a load of other stuff, including, to my horror, a main beam indicator light that had faded to white rather than being the best blue in the world.

Being a sensible chap, I find the best thing to do in this situation is to get Jonathan to do everything - he can hardly stop himself. He was replacing the aerial with a torch in the dark one night, and, as ever, ordering stuff that was wrong or not needed in a frenzy of excitement (although I forgot I'd had replacement rear speakers fitted and order them twice). Once he calmed down, he and I came up with this list:

Engine oil and filter
air filter
cabin filter
fuel filter
coolant
transmission fluid and filter
check transmission vacuum supply
check (and replace if necessary) fuel lines
engine and transmission mounts
poly-v belt and tensioner
power steering fluid and filter

Discs and pads all round front, rear
check (and replace if necessary) brake pipes

Fix air con as necessary (condensor, dryer, compressor, evaporator)

Front shocks
Front shock top mounts
Front ARB bushes
Ball joints
Check (and replace if necessary) LCA bushes/LCAs left, right
Track rods left, right
Centre link
Steering damper
Steering idler bush

Rear subframe bushes x 4 fr pair, rr pair
Rear suspension links Febi
Rose joints in rear suspension
Rear shocks

Check fuel gauge/fuel tank sender
Front left window motor A1298207342
Right seat belt presenter
Windscreen wiper motor (and rebuild lower windscreen trim)
Rebuild wiper trim
Headlamp wiper motors x 2
Mainbeam indicator lamp is white not blue, replace filter(s)
Fit Rainbow bespoke speakers front and rear
New antenna mast
New speedo cable
Remove alarm
Remove phone kit and make good holes to centre binnacle
Rebuild front door trim to eradicate rattle (install extra sound proofing in doors)
Replace dashboard top
Fix vacuum leak
Noisy fan

Re-align left headlamp
Check and adjust window alignment
Dashboard and cluster lamps

New boot carpet

BODYWORK
Remove roof hole
Replace rear window
Scuffed n/s front bumper rubber
Rear 300 CE 24 badge
New numberplates

Summer tyres : Michelin or Continental
Winter tyres
Winter alloys / Summer alloys

The car was wearing Charles Ironside plates and a friend of ours actually recognised the car as one he'd been offered by that dealer some years before, and remembered that the car previously belonged to Nick Faldo. The fact that it was owned by the millionaire golf bat swinger might explain the amazing spec - by this point we had worked out that the car would have cost around £52k list in 1991, which in today's money is £104k. I sent off to the DVLA for the history to see if this intelligence was founded in fact or fantasy.

I ran the car for a few weeks, which was great fun so long as the nearside window decided it was going to close when I parked up, and then it came time for it go to the place where the normal rules of time do not exist, namely Staithes Garage, home of the legendary Phil Baister, and Terry, the Penfold to Baister's Dangermouse. They had already serviced the car upon arrival and pronounced it "fkin' stone mint, that, like". Now it was time for it to disappear for months, for "20 minute jobs" to take 20 Venus minutes and for only half the items on the list to be done. OK, so I exaggerate, at least two-thirds of the list wold be done. Jonathan, does Baister read Pistonheads? I hope not. Anyway, as ever Baister rejected most of Jonathan's demands, and got on with the essentials, whatever they were (I still haven't had a bill, er, over 6 months later). So far as I understand there was lots of suspension work, the brakes were sorted out, but a lot of the car was remarkably good, with original uncorroded fuel lines. Someone had looked after this car properly - perhaps Sir Nick, or perhaps some pathetic snivelling oily minion of the great Scots golfist.

The summer turned into autumn and that turned into winter and the car moved from Baister's shadowy network of lock up garages to Jonathan's mysterious "Man" (as lovingly described in his 300TE thread. I got ill and by this time had forgotten I owned the thing and frankly just wanted to die. Jonathan would occasionally drag me from my sweat-soaked sick bed to meet him at his man's place to discuss the bodywork ("Come on, don't you want to talk about your car?") without checking his man was there, and it would take all my self-control not to go to the boot of my W140 (which I think he had borrowed and defiling with "breeder" equipment such as "kiddie" "booster" seats), take out the not insubstantial tyre iron, and bray the dandified fop with it. Anyway, I finally got over the lurgy, finally met Johnny-boy's Man and we were off. This is what he did to the car first:

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Holy fksticks! That was quite severe, I thought. But Jonathan's Man carried on sanding it down and making it look like something out of Mad Max. At this point I quite fancied going down the Mad Max route, and asking him to fit a roll-cage and a cow-catcher, but the man had other ideas and suddenly the car looked like this:




Yeah! That's more like it! As you can see, the car here is wearing some wheels borrowed from Jonathan's vast collection, whilst the 4 plus the spare went off to SEM Alloys for refurbishment (£50 plus VAT each) and some nice new Contis (£60 plus VAT each again) (scored from Barry of the legendary "Barry's Tyres"). About this time we were spending forever debating what radio solution to go in, and whether to go down the period Becker or modern Becker. In the end, we fudged it with a single CD loading Mercedes Speciale, an Alpine unit, which I think I (for once doing something) found on Ebay for 100 euro or something like that. That went off to the amazing Agenta Audio in Ilkley to see if it could be Bluetoothed and USB'd - it can't, but they came up with a solution involving an external Yatour unit which is about to be launched like some Chinese spaceship of the aftermarket Bluetooth world.

Jonathan's Man got increasingly excited as the job went on because he could find no rust on the car other than a tiny bleb by the rear screen, and rather than having to gouge out flaky iron oxide and recreate jacking points, he found it was all going smoothly and he could just carry on rubbing it with different grades of rubbing stuff. A new screen was fitted together with several minor trim parts - new kick plates and things like that. Jonathan found a new grille on Ebay which I bought for £50, and it arrived and turned out to be... a second hand grille! With dents and compression marks where the previous owner's badge (Institute of Advanced Motoring? Institute of Advanced Property Misdescribing?) had been fitted. The vendor is refusing to provide a full refund (so far I've got him up to £41), so I'm having a lot of fun writing stroppy letters explaining the provisions of the Sale of Goods Act 1979 to him and secretly hoping he doesn't stump up so I get day trip to the court, probably in Glasgow, to get my £9 out of his grasping and no doubt fingerless-glove-shod hands.

Back to the car, the bodywork was nearly ready, and then it went back to Baister-land for more 20 minute jobs.

In the meantime I'd got the DVLA history on the old banger, and it turned out the first owner was in fact a South African tennis player called Danie Visser, who had won the 1990 Mercedes Cup. The prize in this tennis match was a load of Deutschmarks plus a Mercedes, and presumably that's how old Danie went wild with the options box. I sent him a Facebook message but he didn't reply, probably too busy drying his biltong. Anyway, about 2 weeks after importing it in 1991, Danie transferred it to Eric Drossart, a Belgian former tennis player who was with International Management Group. However, it looks like Eric was just a nominee for Sir Nick, because Nick's numberplate, "211 NF" was transferred onto the car at this point. He kept it for 10 years. Mercifully his lass didn't bray it with one of his golf bats like she did to his 959. Then it went to Benoit de Biolley, a Swiss hedgie, for 6 years. Then Ironside who sold it to one Andrew Mitchell, not I think the red-faced policeman-defaming floppy-haired would-be cyclist, but some other geezer.

20 minutes passed like it could have 2 weeks and then the car went back to the Man for final polishing. I bought a poncy new numberplate that looks like a bit like "Hexes" (because I'm good at cursing people - got that, grille man? Where's my £50?) and that went on, and well, here it is now:











There's still work to be done - the stereo is awaiting the Yatour unit, there's stacks of detailing to do, my obsession with a clean boot carpet has yet to be satisfied, and I'm sure Jonathan can think of a million other things, but it's some progress. The car is looking gorgeous, the Man saying he had 2 purchase enquiries on the day he left it out on his forecourt. I took it up to Jonathan's last night and it drove very well, the suspension improvements mean that it is riding very squarely and soundly on the road, as Jonathan tried to demonstrate when he took his local roundabout like it was the Mulsanne straight. In terms of the important info, well, I haven't seen Baister's bill yet, but I'm guessing in round terms it's been about £10k including the purchase price to get to where we are now. Maybe £11k. Or £12k. Best not to think about these things too carefully.

I'm sure I've missed out all sorts of essentials in this narrative, like parts numbers and paint codes and everything else that R129SL knows off by heart, but no doubt he can fill in the gaps in due course.

Charles

Edited by tianimu on Friday 20th March 00:34

Edited by tianimu on Friday 20th March 12:09

[tianimu]

RoverP6B said:

Chuffing marvellous. What a lovely smoker barge. Incidentally, £52k in 1991 is high 70s to mid 80s grand now, not 104k, according to several inflation calculators. To put that in perspective, when new, my E39 535i was 52k including autobox, sports seats, clever computer etc - 64-72k by today's estimates - call that 68k average - and I got it last October for under 600 quid. That's over 99 percent depreciation - and it sure as hell isn't 99% less of a car than it was in 1998... might have dropped a few percent, but it really goes to show how crazy the new car market is, people constantly moving on up to the latest and bestest... but are we driving better, more desirable cars now? I don't think so - if anything we've gone backwards in that respect...

Thank you! I certainly think the modern S class is absolute pants in terms of build quality and refinement to my now very rusty (and possibly a new Jonathan project) W140, and the same can be said for nearly all modern cars.

The thorny topic of economic datasets - I was sent down from Exeter University (a real achievement in the late 80's) for failing all the first year exams in the economics degree I was reading for, so I'm on pretty sketchy ground here (although I actually passed statistics!). I lazily used this site without checking its bona fides (which is a bit scary. because I use it at work in making all sorts of assertions...), but, probably by accident rather than design, the numbers are right. The RPI was 133.5 in 1991 and 256 last year, so the value of money has basically halved during that period. I hope! Otherwise I'm a academic economic failure even in Stats....

[tianimu]

I'm now tootling about in the 300CE-24 and so far:

(1) My neighbour's cats waited a whole day - ONE DAY - before scratching it, on the roof, when they slid off, and on the side above the door, as they slid off. Apparently these scratches will easily polish out - the Man is doing it tomorrow - but I was in the mood for fresh cat-blood last night. I've bought a solar powered sonar cat scarer and some garlic/cayenne pepper pellets to go on my back garden (which I park next to). The alternative is I lock the car away in a garage, but there are none for hire or sale near here, so it will be far away and then I'll forget I own it and won't drive it. Hopefully some cat re-education and/or a less slippery car may prevent more of this. Or, as there are three of the bds, a cat crucifixon?

(2) Because it's new and shiny, I'm terrified of bashing it and assume that everyone else on the road wants to bash it. It has picked up a microscopic chip on the offside wheel arch, probably inflicted by one of my work colleagues, many of whom suffer from poor spatial awareness (and poor self-awareness, come to think of it). The Man is dealing with that chip, and again, I have to decide whether I want to use it and take the risk of this stuff, or lock it up and forget about it.

(3) The badge dilemma. The badge comes in 2 parts, the 300CE 24 part and then the hyphen. I was slightly disappointed that anyone can buy the badge - surely you should have to prove you own the car, and its installation should be supervised by that bald man with the moustache and the paint thickness meter from Mercedes Classic magazine? Anyway, the fitting instructions did not reveal where the hyphen should go and, brilliantly, the hypen is not symmetrical - it has a short side with rounded edges and a long side with square edges. You can imagine how many engineering meetings there were at Stuttgart in the late 80's to determine the design of the hyphen. I've spent the last 6 months screeching to a halt every time I see a C124 and running over to see if it is a 300CE-24 and if has the badge on. Twice, both times in Spain, I've found 300CE-24's with missing hyphens. Eventually I found this on the internet and thought that given the lack of lunatics other than Jonathan and myself wanting to retrofit 300CE-24 badges, it was probably original and right.



So the Man was given orders to follow the pic, and here it is:



Well, now it's on, I'm not sure. Dangermouse and Penfold are both of the view it's wrong, given the Baister's Mercedes-whispering ability I'm now wavering, and Jonathan thinks it's too high, and is muttering darkly about writing to the Mercedes Classic Center. The Man says it's easy to move if necessary. Anyone got an original 300CE-24 with the badge on, and a camera?

(4) The car is running very well - I whizzed down to see the parentals in Yorkshire yesterday and it was pretty amazing. I normally smoke around in a W140 S420 which makes pretty much everything else feel like a small, flimsy, low-slung, ride-on-rotavator, but the 300CE-24 is not lacking in refinement. It certainly feels more like you're driving a car and less like you're relaxing in the boardroom of the Bundesbank than the W140, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, especially when corners are involved. Much as commonsense would say keep W124 as a "high days and holidays" car, I know perfectly well I'm going to drive it all the time for the immediate future. There's a lot more to do, especially in relation to the interior, so I'm writing lists, but a period of bedding in before it disappears back to the Lovejoy of the Mercedes world's shed.

Sunday morning:





90 miles later:

Edited by tianimu on Monday 23 March 13:01

[tianimu]

cheddar said:

Am I right in thinking that, given enough road, these 24 valve spec 300's could crack 150?

The quoted top speed is 237kmh, so 147mph. I tend to get a bit queasy around 125mph, but no doubt a certain someone will do a high speed test on his special closed test track (aka the A1 north of the Morpeth turn-off) and report back.

[tianimu]

r129sl said:

The OP and I both owned a 320 TE (another story).

The Golden Barge! What a story that was! I should write a book!

And funnily enough, another car where the purchase price was but a minor triviality when it came to the final tally of what was spent on the finished article.

But golly, it was worth it, its low key just-dropping-the-kids-off-at-the-gymkhana-before-going-to-pick-up-the-new-sofa-from-Laura-Ashley looks belied the fact it went like stink. I can remember fondly being given a clenched fist salute by a 230E in the slow lane of the fabled Morpeth bypass as I hooned past at the speed of a well known 1970's Inter City train. It was a real Q car.







It's obviously not very fair to compare something the bigger than the 3rd smallest storage unit at the Big Yellow Storage Company with a coupe, although they were both 5 speed Sportlines, but the 300CE-24 has a lovely rorty, raspy howl that I can't remember the Barge having. Performance wise they seem pretty similar, although I'm still really getting to know the 300CE-24. Jonathan of course turned it up to 11 within about a mile of his house last week and as the passenger I certainly wasn't wishing we could go faster.

[tianimu]

I was waiting for Geordie to re-fit my skirting boards this afternoon, and, as the minutes turned into hours, to while away the time I reached for the April 1991 edition of Mercedes Benz's classic of the horror genre, "Recommended Price List for Cars and Factory Fitted Extras", and totted up the options for the 300CE-24.

This is what Danie Visser would have paid for the car had it not got it for basically nothing by rocking up to Stuttgart to hit balls over a net and drink Gerste Wasser des Robin Von Sohn. Bear in mind that he won the doubles cup, so he only had to do half as much work.

Item	£
Base Car	39,750.00
Driver airbag	1,433.15
Driver's electric memory seat	954.70
Passenger's electric seat	506.01
OST gauge	123.10
Leather	1,728.81
5 Speed auto gearbox	723.37
Sportline	1,762.46
Less credit for standard alloys	-691.64
Sportline steering wheel and gearshift	166.25
Less credit for standard wheel and gearshift	-124.70
Aerial and front loudspeakers	398.05
Rear speakers	226.32
Air con	2,270.21
Cruise	348.58
Heated seats	414.42
Illuminated vanity mirrors	73.65
Metallic paint	684.20
	50,746.94

So, £50,746.94 (excluding delivery and road tax) and no radio. There was also an option code 362 for "Hermes Communication Module LTE" which isn't in the price list and I don't know what it is. The car wasn't fully loaded. Had Danie a bottomless pit of money rather than merely a twinkle in his eye and his innate skills with catgut on felt, he could have added such wonders as Acceleration Skid Control (£2,063.96), Automatic Locking Differential (£944.42), a two tone horn (£167.33), self-levelling rear suspension (£674.33), orthopaedic seats (£399.24 each), sump shield (£106.28), fire extinguisher (£92.32), a 90 litre fuel tank (£72.46), a rear blind (£374.99), electrically adjustable steering column (£380.95), console boxes front (£165.43) and rear (£105.84) and a passenger airbag for Mrs Visser (£1,059.48), and told Faldo to go swivel. He could have even had a detachable ball neck tow bar (£721.73). But harsh economics meant, I think, that he took what Mercedes would give him and flogged it to the pride of Welwyn Garden City (yes, I now appreciate that Faldo isn't Scottish).

If £50,746.94 seems like an enormous amount of money, here are some base prices for other Mercedes models: a 500E was £57,220; a 500SEC £60,790 and the 560SEC another £9k on top of that; a 500SL was £70,090 and that didn't include airbags, rear seats or a radio.... (hilariously, a detachable ball neck tow bar was again available as an option). But how cheap are those 500SL's now? My fingers are itching.

Jonathan, no doubt, can consult his massive library of car mags and tell us what £51k would have scored from Merc's competitors in 1991. Presumably it could have also got you a 2 bedroom flat in SW6...

Edited by tianimu on Tuesday 24th March 01:27

[tianimu]

A building project has got in the way of much other than some polishing and use of the 300CE-24. I'm building up a list of little niggles to be fixed, but generally the car is better than I could possibly have hoped for. Jonathan is locked in combat with the Mercedes Customer Care people who are denying, in the face of all evidence, including blown up photographs. that the hyphen in the 300CE-24 badge is asymmetrical. Updates to follow, but in the meantime here is the old girl captured during "the golden hour" up at the beach the other day.